Should I re-do some of the tab map Pics ?

[Knuckles 904]

I posted this in part of another thread, but I felt it deserved one of it's own. I've been playing with Gimp since I did the Ancestral Chamber page, and started thinking about some of the other tab maps I got out there that I now do not like. Take Thylysium for example. The city is waaay too large to capture in a single pic and what I have now really doesn't represent the city. So I played with Gimp and combined 21 pics Below is the tab map currently on the page and then the next pic is the one I'm thinking of replacing it with (I'll have to re-size it on the page if I end up swapping pics)

 

Current map

 

 

 

Proposed New Map

 

[Silver_fox 397]

Wow. Just wow. It's the MAP. Come to think of it, that' the first time I see a real overview of that city. I can even tell how many houses actually is in it...

 

To put it simple, I really like this new map. The only doubt I have is that the map on the place page should be very small. I wonder if it'd be somewhat recognizable after resizing. But what I see here is a really good map.

[Schot 407]

I see how this can be needed. Most places in Ancaria will easily fit within a single tab map but very large places will needed several images sewn together. Nice work on that btw Knuckles! I had the same thought regarding it's thumbnail version as Silver. Could you apply your pic to the Thylysium page knuckles? That'll give us a better perspective to work with.

 

The only complication I can see at the moment is that I'll very likely swap out map pics for the interactive map. Eventually we'll have a mini interactive map on all the pages that might need one like places, quests, NPCs and so on.

[Silver_fox 397]

@Schot: About interactive maps - well, I should say that they may be really slow. My Internet connection isn't the slowest one (at least I may play games without a lag), but the big interactive map of Ancaria works really slow for me. It takes so much time to scroll it from one place to another, that I'd rather look at the simple still image if it shows the object of my interest. If we care about various users, we shouldn't insert too much stuff that requires a lot.

[Dragon Brother 619]

I like both of them...I like how the new one shows everything all at once, but its kinda small and cramped, whereas the larger one shows everything as it looks ingame in real scale...its just huge...

[Schot 407]

I'm right there with you regarding the concern for readers to load the page properly. As websites go that's priority number one. For myself I've never experienced lag with the map. Unless of course our server is running slow which does happen from time to time. The programming of Google Maps is actually quite genius in how it loads. It only loads what will be visible on the map upon loading and with regards to scrolling only what is scrolling into view. Each of the image squares that comprise the map are of very low file size. Between 20 - 50 KB in file size. That's something I paid special attention to when I prepared the map images. On the other hand... Google Map markers are known to cause lag when there are a lot of them. With that in mind I will be having map markers off by default and provide readers with check boxes to turn on/off marker types of their choosing. In addition to that the load times should be greatly reduced by the size of the map that will be used on those pages. How does this one load for you Silver?

 

Test Map

 

The fun thing about that is you can click on the word Dungeons in that mini map and see right away what lies beneath Thylysium.

 

 

All that aside Knuckles I still think you should set up what you have in mind on Thylysium. At the very least I still have a number of things to work out on the map before I can start implementing it.

 

 

P.s.

It just occurred to me... You could use both images Knuckles. You can have the first image in your post link to the second that you made.

[Ysne58 236]

Awesome work Knuckles.

[Knuckles 904]

I knew I should have asked you if you had some project in the works Schot If you're going to eventually re-do the maps with the interactive one then I'll stop here lol

 

That map took a few hours to do and I'd rather not put that kind of time and effort into it if it's just going to be replaced down the road. Plus I would need to re-size the pic and square it up to fit the current format on the Places Page.

[Silver_fox 397]

How does this one load for you Silver?

 

Test Map

Well, this one lags a bit less than the big one... a bit. When it's scrolled I first see a blank grey screen with only markers on it, then it waits for 2-3 seconds and slowly shows the map tiles. After pressing the 'dungeons' button I had to look at the grey screen for about 10 seconds and began to think that it's not implemented yet... and then it finally appeared.

 

Most probably, while having not the slowest connection, I have a big ping time to the wiki server. Sadly, but my Internet provider is known for a big fat ping. The same story may be told about many russian providers. And the server must be really far from my country.